The Man In Favor Of Segregation
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Education, Race
Well, this is kind of weird…
Ernie Chambers is Nebraska’s only African-American state senator, a man who has fought for causes including the abolition of capital punishment and the end of apartheid in South Africa. A magazine writer once described him as the “angriest black man in Nebraska.”Ernie Chambers, the only African-American in the Nebraska Legislature, was a major force behind a law enacted this week that calls for dividing the Omaha school district into three districts defined largely by race.
He was also a driving force behind a measure passed by the Legislature on Thursday and signed into law by the governor that calls for dividing the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, one largely black, one white and one mostly Hispanic.
However, the measure seems doomed to failure…
Civil rights scholars call the legislation the most blatant recent effort in the nation to create segregated school systems or, as in Omaha, to resegregate districts that had been integrated by court order. Omaha ran a mandatory busing program from 1976 to 1999.“These efforts to resegregate schools by race keep popping up in various parts of the country,” said Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, adding that such programs skate near or across the line of what is constitutionally permissible. “I hear about something like this every few months, but usually when districts hear the legal realities from civil rights lawyers, they tend to back off their plans.”
I have to say, this is pretty troubling stuff. Having minority leaders call for legislated segregation is not only odd, it’s sad. More to come soon I’m sure.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 and is filed under Education, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 21st, 2006 at 11:04 am
While I agree it shows how little progress we’ve made as a post-Brown/ post-Jim Crow society, I think it’s also a case of things not being what they seem. The failure of school integration is most apparent in the undisputable “achievement gap” that exists between students of different races in this country.
Segregationism is sometimes looked to by other disenfranchised segements of society (women — radical feminists, specifically) as the only true hope of realizing potential and progress within a group of people. This is based on the underlying theory that to “succeed” in today’s world means to assimilate to a white male-dominated and oriented society. It may be that this man believes that integration is really more destructive to his community because it is truly assimilation, in which they are forced to mimic white culture and white cultural values in order to “get ahead”. It’s basically like this: you can suceed in white male culture if you act like a white male.
What were white people willing to give up to integrate society/schools? Were white parents jumping at the opportunity to send their kids to predominantly black schools? Furthermore, what happens when elements of non-white culture begin to permeate the mainstream? Massive resistence, hysteria and fear.
Its a vialbe theory that being educated in a community that embraces your value system would be a more conducive environment to learning. Not to say that value systems differ necessarily according to race, but they may in some places. They may also differ according to sex, income, age and geography.
I’m not advocating segregation, at all. I’m simply saying it’s sad because it’s a response to the failure of de-segregation’s implementation, not its principle. It shows radical apporaches arising out of frustration of not being truly woven into the fabric of society, not a militant desire to isolate a group from society.